


sweet south infects the starved brain

by houndstoothed



Category: The Witcher (TV), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, Female Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia, Female Jaskier | Dandelion, it also probably counts as shit but ah well, this probably counts as au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 06:06:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27899563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/houndstoothed/pseuds/houndstoothed
Summary: There are no dark, low-ceilinged inns here, shoulder-packed with questionable travelers and shitty ale; no rough whiskeys, home brewed in some farmer's cellar, going down as smooth as Jaskier imagines cyanide would and making her cough up if not one then both lungs.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion
Comments: 6
Kudos: 23





	1. an interrupted bath

**Author's Note:**

> Self-indulgent Witcher fic because I didn't know how much I wanted bisexual Jaskier and lesbian Geralt until I stumbled across it on here and it ruined my life. My knowledge of the games is slim to none and my knowledge of the stories are none to slim, so most of my base here comes from the Netflix show and also other better-written fanfiction. The title is from The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter.

If I was born as a blackthorn tree,  
I'd want to be felled by you, held by you,  
Fuel the pyre of your enemies-

_Hozier_

And I'm a goddamn coward, but then again so are you  
And the lion's roar, the lion's roar  
Has me evading and hollering for you  
And I never really knew what to do

_First Aid Kit_

When Yennefer shows her face, Jaskier is in the bath.

**1**

It's hot, hot enough to slough away the day's grime—insofar as spilled tea and sweat can be considered grime—and leave Jaskier feeling well and truly relaxed. She’s got wine, she’s got some sort of thinly-sliced meat wrapped around cheese, she’s got the distantly-sourced strumming of a lute. The sun is low outside. Steam from her bath lifts with the smell of lavender. Jaskier is as content as she can be, boiling away like stewing vegetables, considering what she can rhyme with "emotionally decapitated", when—

"I do love a good party."

Jaskier takes in a mouthful of water and violently coughs it back out again. Then, after a long, somewhat embarrassing moment of spluttering, she turns in her bath, one arm half-covering her exposed parts, and finds herself gazing into the frankly _unwelcome_ smirk of Yennefer of fucking Vengeberg. Still irritatingly beautiful, leaning idle against the doorframe; she's dressed for travel—leathers, hair tied back—and somewhat bare-faced, but smells like fruit and berries and looks nothing like Jaskier looks after a day's ride, leading Jaskier to suspect she's just magicked herself directly into the bathroom from whichever unlucky kingdom she's just finished decimating. 

"Hello Jaskier."

"I— hello Yen. What er— what are you doing here?"

She pushes off the wall and strolls, entirely at ease, around the tub. “I was invited.”

”You were— wait,” Jaskier quiets, and then sighs and sits back. “The Countess invited you?”

She shouldn’t be surprised. Yesterday's early-arriving guests had included a young Lordling from Cidaris, invited solely because the Countess Harella knew he would be accompanied by an entirely-female armed guard and two—count them, _two_ —mages. The guest list is eighty percent female. And Yen, whose reputation parallels the Witchers' in notoriety and imagination, is exactly the kind of obscenely-pretty magic-blooded _pain-in-the-ass_ that the Countess delights in entertaining. Jaskier can't get away from them. Even here, where she should have been impossible to find, she can't get away from them.

Yennefer has moved to the windowsill, swiping Jaskier’s wine on her way past.   
  
“Also Tissaia, I think Sabrina,” she yawns, ticking mages off on her fingers. “Although I doubt Tissaia will come.”

"Oh, well what a pity she’ll surely be missed _why did you accept?”_

"Like I said,” Yen rolls her shoulders in a shrug— “I love a good party.”

Somewhere beneath the immediate confusion—and outrage—of Yennefer’s manifestation in her bathroom, Jaskier is developing a nervous stomachache. The mage exists to her solely as an acquaintance of Geralt. They’ve never encountered one another when Jaskier wasn’t traipsing after the Witcher—or being lugged into a castle over the Witcher’s shoulder—and she can’t help but feel like she might turn around and find the White Wolf, filthy and grumbling, standing by the door. 

No, she mustn't think like that. Yennefer flits around courts as she pleases; it’s entirely logical that she should accept a party invitation. Geralt, not so much. Not a fan of court, not a fan of parties. There’s no sense in expecting—

“She’s here, bard.”

_Fuck._

Summer is stretching on like a disease. The days get hotter and longer and, for Jaskier, in the courts of her third-favourite Countess, unbearably full of cheer.

Harella's people celebrate the season with a cultish vigor. Every day seems to bring about a new party or banquet, some sun-God's birthday, swallows returning to the lofts. It's making Jaskier's self-imposed banishment significantly less dramatic, and her evening bath is accompanied by an orchestra of muffled laughter and music and chanting. She's unsure of today's reason for celebration, but the sandstone courtyard she passed through this morning was decked in little white flowers and barrels of barley wine. A few of Harella's handmaids were gathered by the fountain with silk-lined baskets of dates and peaches. Jaskier gave them a mournful wave and then returned to her rooms, refusing their offer of fruit, determined not to enjoy any of the seasonal joy pressing down on all sides. She hasn't even taken up rooms in the castle. She picked the shittiest inn she could find in which to hole up and be maudlin, and even this is somehow significantly nicer than half of the rain-soaked hamlets she and Geralt trudged through in their travels.

She's been here for three months now. When she left Geralt, having just been told in no uncertain terms the truth of their arrangement, there were many places she considered going. First and foremost: the nearest inn. Then, once she'd tossed back a few heavy ales, maybe a steep cliff. The reality of her initial journey was obviously much, _much_ sadder and less heroic than anything she'd imagined while trudging through the woods alone. She reached the nearest town, checked into the first inn she encountered, and cried in a room for twelve hours. It was tragic even by her own standards, and she bitterly imagined that Yennefer would get a good laugh out of it. 

In the end she came here because she was invited. Harella has a party every year, toward the end of her kingdom's long summer, when the wine barrels are swollen and the fruits plentiful and her people run out of excuses to dance through the streets. The Countess dispatches her mage with armloads of invites, offering one to everyone and anyone that she deems interesting enough to deserve one. Jaskier is in no mood to party, but the kingdom's walls are high and she doubts that a Witcher has ever set foot inside them. So she spends the first two months wallowing in her own misery, trying to block out every thought of Geralt that she'd ever played host to, and, as all things fade with time, eventually she begins to feel ever so slightly less like she's mourning the loss of her silly imagined life with the White Wolf of Rivia. 

The wines help. She's drunk most of the time. Her lute is somewhere in her room, buried under a carpet of discarded clothes. Her notebooks are, she assumes, similarly displaced. There are no dark, low-ceilinged inns here, shoulder-packed with questionable travelers and shitty ale; no rough whiskeys, home brewed in some farmer's cellar, going down as smooth as Jaskier imagines cyanide would and making her cough up if not one then both lungs. But there _is_ wine, and by the _Gods_ it's good wine. Jaskier can spend entire days floating like a lily pad, the sun browning her shoulders, drunk as a fool. Staring up at the sun and trying not to think of how bad Geralt would smell in this heat. 

She tries not to think of her all the time, but its a conscious effort and its also a lose-lose situation. She has to think about her... in order to not think about her. She can't stop thinking about her. 

And now she's here.

Somewhere. 

Jaskier daren't ask where. She's afraid that if she opens her mouth she might throw up into her own rapidly-cooling bathwater. She's also trying her hardest not to show Yennefer - who is _still_ perched coolly on the sill, drinking from Jaskier's wine - how many clashing emotions are presently churning through her insides. Because even now she feels shame in her own humanness. And if anything this shame has only increased during her time here; because surely the most human thing she could have done, whilst all these magical people were fighting for everyone's future, was to wallow in misery for months on end because she was in love with a fucking Witcher. 

"What the fuck are they actually _singing about_?" Yen is saying, sounding almost annoyed in her confusion. 

She's staring out of the window at the streets below, where crowds of people are still celebrating- well, whatever they've been celebrating all day. Cheeses? Jaskier isn't sure. She's fairly certain that the question was rhetorical, and even more certain that Yennefer doesn't actually want to know what they're singing about. She's still got blood beneath her nails. A kingdom throwing parties to honour their fortunate harvests isn't anything she wants to hear about, which once again prompts Jaskier to wonder why she's even here. 

She has a sudden urge to be a lot less sober than she currently is. 

At the sound of the water sloshing, Yennefer turns away from the window and surveys Jaskier climbing out of the tub. "Don't tell me you're going to join them, bard."

"Nope," Jaskier says, snatching up her dress and pulling it over her head. "I'm going downstairs. Something about you fills me with the unerring desire to get very, very drunk."

"Well I hope you don't mind company." 

"I do not."

(In her lowest moments, when the drink hits her just wrong and the pre-dawn blackness of her room is unrelenting, she lets herself think it through. It's masochism at its finest, to relish in the misery that doing so brings her. She thinks about how hard she worked to make people see the Witcher she saw, the heroine who saved entire towns from the things that go bump in the night. She thinks about how stupidly happy she'd made herself, living on the road, scuffing her boots and sleeping in the woods and going for entire weeks at a time without a hot bath, only to discover that what she had mistaken for a burgeoning friendship was actually just her annoying the piss out of Geralt of Rivia. Even now, she winces at the thought of it. At what a fool she'd been.) 

There's not enough wine in the world to make her forget.


	2. a thrown date

Yen has already booked herself and Geralt into the inn. Jaskier doesn’t know whether to be delighted or horrified about this, but she’d have the same violent stomachache either way so it probably doesn’t matter.   
  


**2**

“I’ve never stayed anywhere that served wine and only wine before,” Yen murmurs, gazing around the deserted room. She’s changed into a dress and let her hair down. Jaskier, still so nervous she might throw up, wants to toss her drink over it. 

“They’re very fond of their wines,” she says instead, taking a healthy gulp— “Harella’s distant ancestors made their fortune with it, built this little city for themselves.” 

“Oh? I take it you’re out of favour at the moment, to be staying—” she gestures around— “ _here_ , rather than in her bed?”

Jaskier shrugs morosely. “I’m in favour well enough, and I’m in her bed enough too if you must know. I _chose_ to stay here.”

“Yes, well, I’d imagine it was easy for you to find the one inn in the entire kingdom that would, eventually, welcome a Witcher.”

At this, Jaskier nearly spits her drink out in indignation. “I didn’t pick this inn because I thought Geralt might drop in,” she snaps, and then immediately questions it. There _is_ something about the dark corners, slightly off-putting dampness, cramped rooms, that brings to mind the places she and the Witcher have laid their heads in the past. And she _has_ spent a lot of time staring at the door picturing Geralt walking through it. 

Yennefer is looking at her, a smirk playing at the corners of her mouth. Jaskier finds herself struck, once again, by a very petty impulse to throw her drink at the mage. 

“Piss off, Yennefer,” she says instead. 

Her stomach is still in knots. It feels like she’s waiting to be hanged, or about to take the stage in a particularly humourless hamlet somewhere; she throws back her wine and waves for another, trying not to cough it back up over herself. Is she always this bloody unstable?? Does Harella—or the rest of her Countesses, for that matter—look down on her with the same level of amused pity as Yennefer? 

She gulps down half of her new glass, desperately questioning the very foundations of her existence. 

“You haven’t asked anything about the battle,” Yen says, twirling a forefinger over the surface of her wine. There’s something sly in the tone of her voice. Were she not already wallowing in a pit of existential horror, Jaskier might have turned suddenly wary— but as it stands she already feels like someone’s dancing on her chest, how much worse can Yen really make things?

“Well the two of you have accepted a party invitation,” she replies, somewhat snappily— “I’m going to assume you won, and that all is right with the world.”

“A bold assumption.”

“Well you can tell me all about it some time, I’ll pen a lovely song for you. Now if you’ll excuse me—” Then she’s on her feet, backing away from the mage, suddenly determined to be anywhere—heavily-attended jail cell, lair of a dragon, _anywhere_ —other than here. “Must dash. Preparations to make, songs to write— er— cheeses to sample. I’m sure I’ll run into you at some point. Shouldn’t be hard, given that you’re, you know, determined to ruin my life.”

Cheeks flushed, heart pounding, and with Yennefer’s highly-amused face fused into her mind, Jaskier plunges out of the room. 

“Jas, sweet bird, you know that I _adore_ the whole _brooding artist_ look on you, but this is really not as bad as you’re making it out to be.”

Harella, to her credit, is more than accommodating when Jaskier strides into her rooms and collapses. Outside, the sun is setting. The sky is turning all the colours of a raw bruise, and if Jas was anywhere near the window she could look down upon the courtyard and see hundreds of illuminated candles and lanterns and sconces, as the cheese-party (or whatever it is) continues into the night. Inside, Harella is cross-legged on her floor, surrounded by yards and yards of fabric—dresses made for her, from which she’s presently choosing which two she’ll wear to her party—and trays of food, barely able to move beyond the barricade of pretty things for her to taste or drink or hold up to the light, and still she favours Jas with her (almost) full attention. 

“How could this be any worse?” Jaskier wails, face buried in a velvet pillow. 

When she eventually lifts her head, the Countess is plucking a little sugar-dusted date from a tray. “You’re in mourning, sweet one,” she says, popping the date into her mouth— “you’ve been _despondent_ ever since you got here. And when Tira said the mages had a lady Witcher travelling with them... well, I thought, what a stroke of luck!”

Pulling a face at the term “lady Witcher”, which fits Geralt like a hessian sack, Jaskier drops her head back into the cushions with a melodramatic sigh. “I wish you’d have _asked_ me,” she says quietly. 

Harella scoffs. “Don’t be silly, no you don’t.”

She’s young, for a Countess, and, like most members of her little kingdom, very well-spoken. This, in combination with the carefree nature of her entire life, often brings outsiders to mistake her for a pretty idiot— like the lioness of Cintra, who branded her a dunce and then apologetically took it back (as apologetically as Calanthe had ever managed, anyway) after spending a few hours in her company. Harella enjoys pretty clothes and parties, but she is also annoyingly astute. And the knowing look she surveys Jaskier with, over her small mountain of discarded gowns, tells Jas that she’s about to have her feelings hurt. 

“Jaskier, you’re not hiding here because the mean mages look down their noses at you. You’re not even here because you felt insecure for the first time in your life—silly, frankly; most of the world would struggle to keep up with a Witcher, and you did just fine. You’re here because you fancy her.”

Jaskier falls off the bed.

Harella, undeterred, shrugs her delicate shoulders and continues leafing through fabric. “I’m not wrong,” she says airily. “And when _I_ fancy someone, I invite them to a party.”

“It’s a little more complicated than that, Harella...” Jaskier grumbles, sitting up. 

“No it isn’t. Try one of the dates, would you? I can’t tell if I like them.”

“I told you, I travelled with her for a long time, I—”

“I know, sweet thing, you were lovely to her and you tried very hard to make all the rotten townsfolk see a grubby, antisocial Witcher in the glowing golden light that you see her—” Harella interrupts, and Jas senses that she’s being gently mocked. “But from what you’ve told me, you caught her at a bad time and she shouted mean things at you. And you ran away.”

Sulkily fisting a handful of dates into her mouth, Jaskier slumps back against the end of the bed. “Is not that simple,” she manages, around the half-mashed fruit. She doesn’t like how this has been turned on her. And she _really_ doesn’t like the fact that she can’t conjure up a logical argument against it. 

“Nothing ever is, song bird,” Harella sighs, pushing herself up and lifting a yellow dress into the light of a nearby candle. “But you made this Witcher sound utterly _fascinating_ and I must meet her. And really, what’s the worst that can happen? Maybe she’ll say she’s sorry.”

Grabbing another date, Jaskier gives a spiteful “ _ha!”_ and tosses it at the Countess. “And maybe she’ll stab me in the head.”

“We can only hope.”

**Author's Note:**

> This had to be a multi-chapter fic because I'm too self-critical and I already hate everything I've written... so if I tried to make it a one-shot I'd be here for months.


End file.
